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According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Sales Report, most sales professionals agree: selling got harder in 2023. What’s on the horizon to make things better for sellers in 2024? Sales professionals are looking at the future of AI, sales enablement tools, and making data-driven decisions.
As artificial intelligence expands its functions, sales enablement teams can use AI to ensure they provide their sales teams with the tools, content, and information they need to close deals and retain more customers.
From content management to sales training, AI can improve the overall sales enablement experience for your sales reps. In this article, we’ll unpack how AI is impacting sales enablement processes and strategies.
Can Sales Enablement and AI Work Together?
Definitely! Thanks to today’s AI-driven sales enablement platforms, AI can support enablement efforts across sales and revenue teams.
AI uses machine learning and predictive analytics to improve your sales forecasts, sales content creation and management, onboarding and coaching, and much more. AI can understand more complex datasets than humans can, allowing you to get more in-depth insights into your customer behavior, sales performance, market, and competition than ever before.
Sales enablement is all about ensuring that sales teams have what they need to thrive. Today’s AI-driven sales tools support a sales enablement team’s efforts, so they can better support all your sales professionals.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process by which companies equip their sales team with the tools, content, and information they need for closing deals and driving the growth of your company. In many ways, sales enablement acts as a bridge between the marketing and sales departments, as sales content creation and management is a significant component of a successful sales enablement strategy.
But sales enablement also touches upon many facets of what today’s sales professionals need to improve customer experiences and drive more sales.
Sales Content Creation and Management
Sales content is an essential part of sales enablement. As the average B2B buyer consumes 13 pieces of content before deciding to make a purchase, sales professionals and other teams that play an important role in lead generation need to create content that’s not only high-quality but tailored to the needs of their audience.
Spekit and other AI sales tools can help with both content generation and management. For example, Spekit AI revolutionizes how your teams prepare for and follow up on calls by providing instant, AI-powered content recommendations.
No more leaving your workflow, no more hunting for answers, and no more guesswork. Spekit AI ensures your team always has the right information at their fingertips, boosting productivity and enhancing efficiency.
Discover the future of sales enablement with Spekit AI.
Sales Training and Coaching
Companies need a combination of sales enablement and revenue enablement, which helps all customer-facing teams maximize revenue throughout the sales pipeline. To optimize revenue, companies need to ensure they’re training their customer-facing teams with data-driven courses and onboarding tools.
Businesses can optimize their sales enablement training since AI can take the company’s sales performance data to tailor their onboarding and sales coaching toward what works best for their teams.
While those courses and workshops are vital for a company’s sales professionals, they can also be utilized to help marketers, customer success, and other customer-facing teams create better customer experiences, boosting your retention and creating a company full of professionals with well-trained selling skills. With Spekit, these courses are broken up into bite-sized bits of learning that can be embedded right into the tools your teams use every day.
Sales Tools and Processes
A study by Salesforce found that sales teams use an average of 10 tools for closing deals. Fortunately, today’s sales enablement tools reduce the need for so many other platforms, as they touch upon every part of the sales pipeline.
By using an AI-driven sales enablement tool, you can streamline your sales processes as the tool creates a hub for your content, training, sales analytics, and more.
How AI Is Improving Sales Enablement
We’ve touched upon the many different facets of sales enablement, but how can AI improve your sales enablement best practices? Let’s take a look.
1. Automated Content Creation
Writing and rewriting sales playbooks, revenue plays, processes, and scripts is a massive time investment for sales enablement teams.
AI sales tools like Spekit AI, change that. Instead of writing content from scratch, Spekit AI will produce baseline content specific to your business based on the prompts you put in.
Not only will you save time, but you can also produce higher-quality content that results in more sales and customer engagement.
Spekit AI can even proofread content, check its tone, and translate it for sharing throughout other countries, ensuring the most impactful content.
This helps your sales enablement team to ensure that your sales representatives have access to all the content they need to connect with and engage potential buyers (while saving massive amounts of time in the process). With Spekit’s content hub and AI features that optimize and personalize that content, your sales enablement team can provide sales reps with content that converts, faster.
2. Enhanced Lead Scoring and Prioritization
According to research by Gartner, 34% of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) convert to sales-accepted leads (SALs). However, the numbers from there are a bit discouraging—since only 47% of those SALs turn into sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Just over half of those SQLs result in a closed deal.
Lead scoring is one of the best ways to up the likelihood of a lead becoming a buyer. This process involves looking at aspects of prospects, like intent data and demographics, to determine how to prioritize the potential buyer. With AI able to unpack more complex data, it can also help you build more in-depth ideal customer profiles and tailor your sales content and approach.
3. AI-Powered Content Recommendations
Sales professionals spend an average of 440 hours each year looking for the right content to share with interested buyers. This lines up with the research from Salesforce that found sales representatives spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. In today's fast-paced, chaotic, selling environments, it’s crucial to give them back as much of their time as possible to focus on closing deals.
Many sales enablement tools create a centralized hub for your content, but newer AI sales tools go a few steps further. Spekit offers AI-powered content recommendations, removing the need for your sales professionals to search through content repositories and folders of sales enablement content to find the right case study, testimonial, or one-sheet for their prospect.
By analyzing the context of sales interactions in tools like Gong, Chorus, Gmail, Salesloft, and more, Spekit AI knows what content the rep needs at that moment and automatically surfaces it so they can spend more time selling, and less time searching.
For sales enablement teams, this gives new life to the content that previously might've been buried within folders collecting digital dust.
No more missing out on deals or sending the wrong content. Spekit AI cuts through the noise by recommending content instantly–without the sales rep even having to search. The AI-powered content recommendations automatically surface the most impactful content to sales reps in the deal-critical moments of meeting prep and follow-up–delivered within the tools they use every day.
4. Personalized Customer Engagement
A McKinsey study found that 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences, with 76% saying that they get frustrated when they don’t receive the personalized interactions they’re looking for. However, manually personalizing every piece of sales content would be a challenging ask for even the most highly-trained sales professional.
Sales enablement teams need to provide sales representatives with tools, data, and content that get them the results they need. With AI-powered sales enablement tools, your sales enablement team can collect and maintain the data to lead to better personalization.
These tools can also personalize the content itself, which helps the sales enablement team save your sales reps the time it takes to personalize every individual interaction.
5. Intelligent Training and Onboarding
Spekit’s research found that almost 50% of sales reps have left a job due to poor onboarding and training. Poor onboarding starts your sales professionals off on the wrong foot from their first day, and a lack of training can decrease your overall employee retention.
AI can analyze data on your sales team’s performance, market, competition, and customer behavior to influence your coaching and onboarding. Many AI sales tools let you create data-driven training courses and even roleplay with an AI-created prospect right through the platform, giving you a hub for all sales enablement training and coaching.
6. Automated Administrative Tasks
Salesforce found that sales professionals spend about 28% of their week selling–which means they spend 72% of their time on other tasks, like administrative tasks. From generating sales reports to submitting invoices for approval, these mundane tasks don’t have to be done manually anymore.
AI-driven sales tools simplify these tasks and perform them for sales representatives, taking them off their workload and streamlining their sales processes. With Salesforce finding that 69% of sales professionals say selling is harder today than in years past, companies can create a happier, healthier workplace by letting sellers focus on what can’t be done manually—like having engaging conversations with prospects.
7. Real-Time Performance Analytics
According to Gartner’s research, 60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based selling to data-driven selling by 2025, with the change being inspired by the fact that B2B buyers now prefer to engage with companies through digital and self-service channels. This move toward multi-experience selling also means that there’s a high need for companies to invest in tracking real-time performance analytics.
AI-powered sales tools can collect, manage, and share real-time analytics, ensuring that it’s accessible to sales teams and beyond and allowing it to impact the many different stages of the sales pipeline. AI can also collect data that goes beyond what a human would be able to gather. For instance, AI uses natural language processing to read conversations for things like tone, which can help train sales representatives to speak in the most influential way or determine the level of interest of a potential buyer.
8. Optimized Content Distribution
Content creation is a vital part of sales enablement, but according to a study by CreativeX, more than half of all marketing and sales content ends up unused. Without a content management system, content can be created by an individual or team without others who may benefit from it ever knowing it’s there.
And, even if they do know it’s there, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to find. Content quality and value can also deteriorate if it’s not updated. If your sales rep needs a piece of content that’s several years out of date, they won’t be able to use it.
With these AI sales enablement platforms, you can share your sales enablement content with the right parties instantaneously. Your sales team, as well as other customer-facing teams, will have a one-stop shop for their content needs, whether they need to create or locate content.
Spekit’s content management system features integrations with other platforms, like Salesforce, making it even easier to share content wherever it’s needed.
Getting Started with AI-Powered Sales Enablement
When talking about the best practices for sales enablement, using an AI-powered sales enablement solution tops the list. Whether you’re looking to optimize your sales coaching or improve your content creation and management, AI sales enablement tools can connect your revenue-generating teams with the training, knowledge, resources, and sales assets they need to engage prospects and close more deals.
The right AI-driven sales enablement tool can align a business’s revenue objectives with the demands of today’s market, bring a sales forecast to fruition, and improve upon the personalized, carefully curated interactions and experiences today’s buyers are looking for.
Spekit AI can help you create content and ensure you’re using it most effectively, boosting your revenue, retention, and more. But content is just one part of the sales enablement puzzle. Spekit AI can also help your sales enablement team ensure your sales professionals get the coaching, training, and guidance they need, without disrupting their productivity.
